How are these seats in Chicago's Orchestra Hall?

Started by Bruckner is God, August 18, 2007, 02:03:40 AM

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Bruckner is God

I just purchased  concert tickets for concerts with the CSO this coming season. It will be my first time there. I couldn't afford the most expensive seats, so I had to settel for these:
Concert 1: Gallery, Row D, seat 113.
Concert 2: Main floor, Row W, seat 109
These are among the cheapest seats in the hall. Will I be able to see anything at all? And how are these seats sonically?
Thank you.

M forever

#1
There is an interactive seating chart on the CSO website which gives you a good idea of how much you will be able to see from these seats. Not too much, to be honest. The hall is very short (when I first stepped in there, I couldn't believe how small it is in diameter), but extremely tall, if you suffer from vertigo, you might pass out in the Gallery  ;D
The orchestra will be very far away way below you somewhere. Bring binoculars. How much you can hear up there, I don't know. When I was there, I treated myself to a seat in one of the front rows of the Lower Balcony which were very good because they are a little up, but really close to the orchestra because the lower balcony is overhanging about half of the Main Floor. Which may be a problem for seats in the back there because they are acoustically shielded by the balcony. On the Main Floor, you don't see too much either because the stage is rather high. But they are using terraced podiums for the orchestra now, so you should be able to see a little more than just the outside desks.
Next time, I would try some of the Terrace seats. These are on the sides and behind the orchestra, so the acoustical perspectives are a little shifted, but still very listenable and the views are great because you can see absolutely everything. I had a seat on the Right Terrace once which is actually on the left side of the orchestra (above the first violins) and the sound was still rather well balanced there. A lot of the sound in a good hall is the product of direct sound and (hopefully) balanced reflections from all over the hall. Orchestra Hall is a little on the dry side, but the sound still carried rather well to the seats which I had, and it is well balanced across the spectrum, so it sounds rather "true" (by which I mean the colors come across well, they aren't muffled or screechy). The only problem is that the brass tend to "lock down" the acoustics in loud passages. Because of the compact dimensions of the hall and the tendency of the brass to play everything very forced and sostenuto instead of allowing the sound to vibrate in the hall, when they do that, you don't hear much of anything else.

The shape of the hall (which is pretty unique, I think, I have never seen a concert hall like that) is obviously dictated by the location of the building in a solid street front on Michigan Avenue. The front of the building is really narrow, I actually couldn't find it at first because I was loking for a freestanding kind of building (which they have across the street, but that's the Art Institute of Chicago) and couldn't see the CSO banners high up on the building from the car. But then I saw the names of dead German guys chiseled across the front which pointed me in the right direction. The building is integrated in a very interesting way into the ones flanking it, so when you walk to the seats on the sides, you actually walk down a corridor outside the original walls. This outer shell is actually very modern, but the way they integrated all that is very tasteful, it is a very nice concert setting. I would just not try to part anywhere in the area, there is a huge parking garage underneath the street righ outside, and more in the surrounding streets, but parking there is obscenely expensive. But the elevated train runs right behind the building, and people who live in Chicago can probably tell you a good strategy where to park and ride.

Which concerts are you going to hear, BTW?

Bruckner is God

Thank you for that.
The concerts I am going to are with Haitink at the of October.
Mahler 6 and Brahms 2nd Pianao concerto (with Ax) among other works.